Tag Archives: Desk Employee

Well, here’s an example from the radically leftist Washington Post of all places. The new movie “Fair Game” about the two Democrats Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The protagonists portrayed in the movie, former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV and former spy Valerie Plame, claim that it tells the true story of their battle with the Bush administration over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Ms. Plame’s exposure as a CIA agent. “It’s accurate,” Ms. Plame told The Post. Said Mr. Wilson: “For people who have short memories or don’t read, this is the only way they will remember that period.”

[…]In fact, “Fair Game,” based on books by Mr. Wilson and his wife, is full of distortions – not to mention outright inventions. To start with the most sensational: The movie portrays Ms. Plame as having cultivated a group of Iraqi scientists and arranged for them to leave the country, and it suggests that once her cover was blown, the operation was aborted and the scientists were abandoned. This is simply false. In reality, as The Post’s Walter Pincus and Richard Leiby reported, Ms. Plame did not work directly on the program, and it was not shut down because of her identification.

The movie portrays Mr. Wilson as a whistle-blower who debunked a Bush administration claim that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from the African country of Niger. In fact, an investigation by the Senate intelligence committee found that Mr. Wilson’s reporting did not affect the intelligence community’s view on the matter, and an official British investigation found that President George W. Bush’s statement in a State of the Union address that Britain believed that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger was well-founded.

“Fair Game” also resells the couple’s story that Ms. Plame’s exposure was the result of a White House conspiracy. A lengthy and wasteful investigation by a special prosecutor found no such conspiracy – but it did confirm that the prime source of a newspaper column identifying Ms. Plame was a State Department official, not a White House political operative.

As everyone knows, Valerie Plame was not outed by the White House. Even the leftist CBS News reported that she was outed by Dick Armey (Richard Armitage) – and it was an accident. This is not in dispute. And in any case, she was a CIA desk employee at the time of the story, not a CIA field agent.

The root problem of so many of our difficulties these days, from the national debt, to the breakdown of the family, etc., is this seemingly limitless capacity we have to insist on having fun all the time. People seem to not care that if they lie to themselves about a person, then it will not matter if they act on the lies – so long as the lies are entertaining.